One of, if not the weirdest story I've ever written. The idea came to fruition when I was driving around with my friend Matt. What had originally been written as a comic script back when I was still under the impression that that was a thing I'd be doing, it got trunked for years,then reworked as a short story. It found a home in the final issue of the forever beloved Broadswords and Blasters.
Minor content warning for bodily excretions.

It's been said of wealth that you can't take it with you when you die--but now, you can. As long as you've got the money, you can pay to have a digital duplicate of your consciousness cavort in a simulated afterlife on a private server forever. Unless you're Lehann Margrove, who got separated from his husband and duped into a "Paradise" he never wanted.

Thanks to a new neural imaging technique, Science can now peer so deeply into a human mind, it's possible to map a person's private mental landscape of symbolic representation--and use that map to build a piece of Art so perfectly tailored, it stops the customer from hungering for any other Art forever. To support his family, artist Mick Lawson is forced to work in the industry that's killing his craft... and in doing so, he meets a client who might also destroy his marriage.

As jobs are automated away, a rising tide of “traditional values” groups erodes the rights of women to hold jobs or leave marriages. But as they’re poised to cement their control with longevity-increasing nanotechnology, just one woman stands in their way. This BSFA Award-nominated story was originally published in Interzone.

Author Stephen Dedman has been publishing short stories and novels for more than twenty years. He’s been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and many more.
Content warning: racism, misogyny.

This is a near future story, but since I wrote it back in the 1990s, it turns out to be set in the present day. I was going to change the dates for this reprint version, but when I re-read it I realized I had assumed a stock market crash in 2008. Given what actually happened in 2008, I'm a little scared to pick a new date for economic collapse. I'd rather not be right again.